What Naomi Osaka Made Visible

On neutrality and the invisible cultural standards that shape sport.

This photograph is now familiar. When tennis star Naomi Osaka walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon, it quickly made waves across the public conversation.

What interested me, however, was not simply the photograph itself, but what it revealed. It brought me back to one of the hardest lessons of studying colonialism: it refuses to stay in the archive. Before you have finished analysing one historical iteration, another appears in everyday life.

"One of the hardest lessons of colonialism is that it refuses to stay in the archive."

You do not simply study colonialism as something that happened; you encounter coloniality, the enduring thread that runs through everyday life, continuing to organise what is seen as normal, legitimate, and neutral.

That persistence of coloniality was on full display in the commentary accompanying the photograph across media platforms. Naomi was described as “bringing culture to tennis”, “taking up space”, “making waves” and becoming a "cultural icon." What stayed with me, however, was not whether the commentary was intended as were praise or criticism but the seemingly instinctive recognition that something had been disrupted.

Whether that disruption was celebrated as bold, courageous, or criticised as theatrical, distracting, or inappropriate, is ultimately beside the point. The question for me was: What was it that people recognized had been disrupted? While the conversation centred on fashion, the answer, I think, lies in the hidden power of neutrality. Sometimes the most powerful cultural norms are the ones we no longer recognise as culture.

"What was it that people recognised had been disrupted?"

Reading neutrality through Wynter

To understand why, I found myself returning to Jamaican philosopher and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter (2003), who argues that Western thought came to overrepresent a narrow, historically specific figure of "Man", the Western bourgeois conception of the human (as if it were the universal human). Everything outside that figure is then understood as variation: a deviation from what has already been established as normal, legitimate and neutral.

Wynter's insight matters because the universal is never empty. It is always inhabited by particular histories, practices, aesthetics, manners, rituals, exclusions, and expectations. It comes with ways of dressing, speaking, moving, appearing, competing, and belonging.

Yet because these practices have been attached to what has been made universal, they are rarely recognised as cultural. Instead, they appear simply as professionalism, tradition, elegance, discipline, or good taste.

This is how culture becomes neutral for some and disruptive for others. Some cultural forms are allowed to disappear into the standard while others are made visible as culture and then placed in the public square to be judged at will, asked to name itself, and justify its presence.  

"Some cultural forms are allowed to disappear while others are made visible as culture and...asked to name itself, and justify its presence."

When culture passes for neutrality

Once a group’s cultural practices become the standard they cease to appear cultural. They become common sense. Everything else becomes "cultural expression".

That is the hidden power of neutrality. It does not announce itself as cultural. It presents itself as the standard against which all other forms of expression are evaluated.

Seen in this light, the conversation around Osaka was never simply about clothing. It was about the invisible cultural order that has long shaped tennis while presenting itself as universal. Osaka did not bring culture to tennis. She made visible the culture that had always been there. And once we see it, the question is not about what Osaka is wearing, but why tennis was ever allowed to imagine itself without culture in the first place.

"Osaka did not bring culture to tennis. She made visible the culture that had always been there."

Where else has culture disappeared into neutrality?

The invitation then is to make the invisible visible; to widen the lens in our everyday lives and ask where culture has been allowed to disappear into neutrality, and which cultures are still being made to carry the burden of being named and explained.

Once we begin asking that question, we find it reaches far beyond sport. We encounter it in our universities, workplaces, boardrooms, courtrooms, museums, media, and public institutions. Wherever one way of being has become so familiar that it no longer appears cultural, neutrality deserves a second look.